Italy’s “Five Stars” Movement and the role of a leader, or, How charismatic power can resurface through the Web

By focusing on the case of Italian political movement “Five Stars”, founded in 2009 by former comedian Beppe Grillo, this article will analyse the resurfacing of a particular kind of power – the charismatic authority – through a platform such as the Web 2.0 that was expected to promote more rational consensus strategies. Although the political action of the Five Stars movement pretends to be inspired by a participative culture, it is in fact directly ruled by the founder via his blog, with a little space allowed for discussions. In this sense, the rise of Grillo as a political leader seems to both retrieve and renew an old form of authority grounded in a very traditional legitimacy - the charismatic and undisputed leadership of the boss – while at the same time able to spread through the network. This article will offer an overview of the events and also provide a theoretical interpretation

Evolution and complexity: the double-edged sword

We attempt to provide a comprehensive answer to the question of whether, and when, an arrow of complexity emerges in Darwinian evolution. We note that this expression can be interpreted in different ways, including a passive, incidental growth, or a pervasive bias towards complexification. We argue at length that an arrow of complexity does indeed occur in evolution, which can be most reasonably interpreted as the result of a passive trend rather than a driven one. What, then, is the role of evolution in the creation of this trend, and under which conditions will it emerge? In the later sections of this article we point out that when certain proper conditions (which we attempt to formulate in a concise form) are met, Darwinian evolution predictably creates a sustained trend of increase in maximum complexity (that is, an arrow of complexity) that would not be possible without it; but if they are not, evolution will not only fail to produce an arrow of complexity, but may actually prevent any increase in complexity altogether. We conclude that, with regard to the growth of complexity, evolution is very much a double-edged sword

Dyadic adjustment and parenting stress in internationally adoptive mothers and fathers: the mediating role of adult attachment dimensions.

Previous research has shown that a positive marital functioning represents a resource in adoptive families, leading to a decrease in parenting stress, but little is known about the factors mediating such a relationship. This study aimed to explore whether adult attachment avoidance and anxiety mediate the effect of dyadic functioning on parenting stress in 90 internationally adoptive couples (mothers and fathers) who had adopted a child (aged 3–10 years) in the last 36 months. Participants completed self-report measures of dyadic adjustment, adult attachment, and parenting stress. A series of path analyses supported the mediation hypothesis, but differentially for mothers and fathers. Among mothers, there was a direct and negative relationship between dyadic adjustment and parenting stress. In addition, a better dyadic adjustment was related to lower levels of attachment anxiety, which in turn were associated with less parenting stress. Among fathers, increased dyadic adjustment was related to lower levels of attachment avoidance, which in turn were associated with reduced parenting stress. These findings suggest the importance of including both mothers and fathers in adoption research. Adoptive parents could benefit from specific interventions aimed at reducing attachment avoidance and anxiety by supporting parental sense of competence and involvement for mothers and fathers, respectively

Foreign Language in the Albanian Primary School, Benefits and Problems

Learning a foreign language in the Primary School is already an incontestable reality not only in European countries, bur also in Albania. This is conditioned by different factors such as political, economic, social and cultural factors. This article focuses on the foreign language learning benefits and problems in the Albanian primary school. - What are some of the scientific data to the benefit of the foreign language learning at an early age? What is the attitude of the students who are now studying at the second level of the 9-year-long school? - Is the formation of the foreign language teachers in the Primary School a problem that calls Education Offices' attention due to the specific nature of that teaching? What are the pedagogical methods that should be applied to an active, motivated, rich and full of variety teaching? - What is the ratio of oral learning to written learning? Is the continuity between different levels of the 9-year-long-school taken care of? After a long-lasting fieldwork through studying, analysis, reflection and questionnaires among pupils and teachers involved in the foreign language learning and teaching process in the primary schools and the second level of the 9-year long schools of the town of Gjirokaster as well as these pupils' parents, we have tried to resolve some of the problems pointed out in our paper.Keywords: foreign language, primary school, appropriate age, teachers' training, school subject, motivation

The N-strikes-out algorithm: A steady-state algorithm for coevolution

We introduce the N-strikes-out algorithm, a simple steady-state genetic algorithm for competitive coevolution. The algorithm can be summarised as follows: Run competitions between randomly chosen individuals, keep track of the number of defeats for each individual, and remove any individual which has been defeated N times. Naive application of the algorithm in 2-population problems leads to severe disengagement. We find that disengagement can be eliminated (for all tasks involving real-valued continuous scores) by determining 'victories' and 'defeats' between fellow members of the same species, using competitions against a single member of the opposing species as a point of comparison. We apply our algorithm to the "box-grabbing" problem for artificial 3D creatures introduced by Sims. We compare our algorithm with Sims' original Last Elite Opponent algorithm, and describe (and explain) different results obtained with two different implementations differing mainly by the harshness of their selection regimes